I am PratikYadav and I work with Mapbox based in Bangalore, India. I came to know about OpenStreetMap and HOT after joining Mabox two years ago and been involved with both of them ever since. I started with taking part in the HOT projects where Mapbox team joins to help HOT in mapping and validation of various tasks over the year.From past few, month I have been working with HOT imagery coordination group to make sure the the request coming for imagrey can be quickly processed by Mapbox.

I worked with Mikel last year to understand the spatial spread of all past HOT tasks.

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tl;dr: use the following from a console:

$ sudo apt install -t jessie-backports openjdk-8-jre-headless ca-certificates-java

JOSM needs Java-8. Open-Java-8 is available via Jessie Backports, but the current update (8u121-b13-1~bpo8+1) needs updated CA-Certificates which were not previously available from Backports (see Debian bug#851667). Unfortunately, Synaptic will not spot the updated certificates in Backports since it keeps holding back openjdk-8-jre, etc.. Thus, the need to use the console line as at top.

Unfortunately, I’d worked my way through the very-useful AskUbuntu question on:

“E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages”

…and had therefore removed all Oracle + OpenJDK Java8 (which meant that all JOSM was also gone & all my Java alternatives reverted to Java7). However, it also meant that I had a different error message on attempted reinstall of Java-8:

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jre openjdk-8-jre-headless ca-certificates-java
  ...
  The following packages have unmet dependencies:
   openjdk-8-jre-headless : Breaks: ca-certificates-java (< 20160321~) but 20140324 is to be installed
  E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

That allowed me to find a Unix Stack Exchange Q which solved the issue. Now I need to reinstall JOSM & make Java-8 the system default (sigh)…

If you map in the West you may come to think that the major stuff in OSM is done, but in developing countries, you may discover major unmapped features.

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Note: English [EN] please find the Spanish version below [SP]

[EN] Last week some members of the OSM Mexico Community had the chance to participate in the first OSM Training focused in Geography professors from High Schools located in municipalities close to the State Capital, Toluca. It was a four day event in the University of the State of Mexico. First Day It was the opening day and Edgar Lemus gave the Talk “Democratization of GIS OSM for high school education” making the professors aware about the importance of open source GeoTechnologies to get more involvement from the students and benefits in the societies. The second part of the event Edgar Lemus and myself gave the following topics to do a full immersion of the professors in the OSM world:

1. What is Open Data? What is OpenStreetMap? What are the benefits of using OpenStreetMap?
2. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap
3. Mapping with ID Editor
4. Mapping with HOTOSM Tasking Manager

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Hi, all. I’m Elida!

Thank you Joseph Reeves, for nominating me to be one of new HOT voting member. I am an Indonesian, and have been a member of HOT Indonesia since 2012 in a project entitled “Scenario Development Planning for Contingency Plan (SD4CP)” where OSM data were applied to generate realistic disaster impact to critical infrastructure. Up until now, I have involved in several activities related to HOT projects (SD4CP, POI Mapping, Bengawan Solo Mapping, Trenggalek Mapping, University Roadshow) -all of them are located in Indonesia- ranging from develop curriculum and training module, deliver training, arrange mapathon, and bring an end to end OSM data collection and usage for specific purpose -mainly in disaster field.

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I’ve started designing a new layout for OSM emails. I’d like to have feedback, and I need help with testing.

Like many websites, OSM.org sends an email to members when something happens that concerns them. For instance, if someone comments on one of your changesets, you get an email. This is similar to how Facebook or LinkedIn send you a message when someone contacts you via their platform.

Unlike those websites, however, OSM emails look quite plain – no colour, no layout, no logo. This must look disconcerting to new users. Good communication with new users is crucial, especially as we’re seeing growing numbers of newcomers to the project who don’t always engage in dialog with the community. More modern-looking emails can only help make the project look and feel more attractive and more legitimate to casual contributors.

Here are some screenshots of the new layout, click to embiggen.

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I think it would be useful to people who simply use OSM data to have standardized, common values for POIs, in particular chain stores. I’ve come across lots of chains where individual stores have wildly varying tags (e.g., variations on the name, incomplete “shop” tags, etc.).

The purpose behind this note is to standardize the tags I will apply to Tractor Supply Co.

My standardized TSC tags:

• addr:city={city name}
• addr:housenumber={street number}
• addr:postcode={zip code}
• addr:state={state}
• addr:street={road}
• alt_name=Tractor Supply
• building=retail (usually)
• building:levels={as appropriate}
• contact:phone=+1 {phone number}
• contact:website=http://www.tractorsupply.com/
• image=http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/blahblahblah {if available}
• name=Tractor Supply Co.
• official_name=Tractor Supply Company
• opening_hours=Mo-Sa 08:00-20:00; Su 09:00-19:00 {as appropriate}
• phone=+1 {phone number}
• ref={store number}
• ~~shop=farm_supply; pet~~ replaced by next line due to discussion
• shop=country_store
• short_name=TSC
• website=http://www.tractorsupply.com/

Just added a new road in princes town Trinidad… hoping it would be updated soon. satellite images out of date, but the road exists.

Currently, many roads in the US are misaligned and out of date according to the satellite imagery, but also exists a bunch of missing roads that should be added and named according to the information provided by the Delta Tiger layer, which is updated until 2015. There were detected 126,981 errors in the cities of EE.UU, so to handle them we use OpenStreetMap Java editor (JOSM), which has some additional plugins such as tofix to solve errors detected in the tiger delta task.

We should install the JOSM plugin by going to the preferences icon, then to the plugin option icon where we search for tofix and finally, check the box and press OK.

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Thank you Ben Abelshausen for nominating me as a HOT voting member, and to Jorieke Vyncke and Harry Wood for additional support!

How did you become involved in HOT?

I have been aware of humanitarian mapping activities on OSM early on, but first really got to know HOT as an organisation through Kate Chapman’s recorded talks. In 2013 I attended State of the Map in Birmingham where I met Ben and Jorieke, and learned about the growing range of development and aid activities that had grown out of the wider OSM network. In Summer 2014, a group of people started the first regular HOT mapathons in London (they would later co-found Missing Maps). I became an early participant, and my involvement grew from there.

Could you tell us about your involvement in HOT, mapping and/or humanitarian response?

I initially became active in HOT as a PhD student researching community organisations, and after some months of exploration decided to make HOT the centre of my work. Over the last 2-3 years I’ve gradually expanded my involvement. At some point during this time I also joined a growing volunteer team around Ivan Gayton, Pete Masters and Andrew Braye to help run their mapathons and other HOT-related activities.

My first tangible contribution is maybe the talk I gave at the first HOT Summit in 2015 (slides). I showed empirical evidence of some HOT community activities and outcomes, and discussed the implications. The talk resonated well, and sparked great debate during the session. Based on the feedback I got I think this helped people gain a different understanding of their work, and their priorities. (Unfortunately the video was never published, maybe we can get it online sometime.)

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Carlton & Nottingham love their Lions ([1] [2] [3] [4]) but I’m now mapping Gedling, and here is one of the latest photos of Gedling Church ([1] [2]), taken from near the top of Queen’s Avenue, to prove it:–

Queen’s Avenue is in the heart of Phoenix Farm Ward, and very close to the location of Phoenix Farm. The farm was demolished in 1954, just as the Estate named after it was being built (councillors, planners & builders love demolishing the old and building new estates) (one clue to the age of these houses is that they all have coal-holes).

The houses that I’m currently mapping all seem to have Royalty — and the then Royal Family in particular — as an (unannounced) theme:–

• King’s Avenue
• Queen’s Avenue
• Princess Close
• Mountbatten Grove
• Margaret Crescent
• Elizabeth Grove
• Philip Grove
• Charles Close

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We are full-time Nomads here in Australia living in a Toyota Coaster.

At least some versions of Maps.me editor (for example, MAPS.ME ios 7.0.4) have a bug, that makes it adding a banner_url= key with a value, that contains a shortened link to some pages, related to Maps.me advertising system.

@Zverik (Ilya Zverev, OSMF Board member, who works for Mail.ru/Maps.me) have assured us in his message on the Russian OSM forum, that it’s a known bug and so on. However, nobody knows, how long some users will keep that buggy version and how long these tags will continue to appear.

Using a simple Overpass query and JOSM, I already have removed about two hundred banner_url= keys from objects, recently added or edited by Maps.me users. It doesn’t take much time, but I’m curious - is there a way to automate it and run a cleanup script, say, once per day?

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Another question is more of a moral kind. Indeed, Maps.me developers (@Zverik himself) have provided a supervision tool for changesets created by Maps.me app. However, it puts the whole burden of supervision on volunteering mappers, while there is no way to reliably detect some anomalies automatically, it is understandable. But this exact case with banner_url= might not have a large impact (about five wrong tags per day), but it is known for a long time and for anyone familiar with a scripting language, it shouldn’t take much time to develop an automated cleanup tool. But nobody of Maps.me developers did that. That doesn’t seem like a responsible manner of working with OSM data. Keeping in mind, how pushy @Zverik (as a moderator) is about being nice and respectful to others on Russian OSM forum, this situation seems like a significant hypocrisy.

The OpenStreetMap community has been adding wikidata tags to OpenStreetMap features for the last several months. Linking OpenStreetMap features to Wikidata can leverage both projects to create novel applications such as multi-lingual maps and integrate other semantic information which OpenStreetMap doesn’t have but Wikidata provides.

Till date, over 400K features have a wikidata tag. The integration of linking wikidata within iD and JOSM editors allowed mappers to efficiently map wikidata tags but the biggest challenge is to focus on the best match for cases when location or names do not exactly match.

This post will walk you through using wikimama, a tool to find and add missing wikidata tags in OpenStreetMap.

Matching Wikidata tags in neighborhoods with ‘wikimama’

Let’s say you want to get a list of all neighborhoods/suburbs within Stuttgart that don’t have a wikidata tag and get a list of wikidata tag matches. The wikimama tool gives you this list that you can manually review and later add to OpenStreetMap.

• Get the information of Stuttgart in OpenStreetMap

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Recently some players of Pokemon Go think that OpenStreetMap data is being used as data in the game, and by editing OSM they can force new things to appear in the game.

Some people don’t like this swarm of newcomers, and rightly point out the bad, incorrect data that people are adding. Sometimes these newcomers are using Google Maps without a full understanding of what copyright is, and why that’s not allowed in OSM.

I’m skeptical that Niantic are actually using OSM data this way. They may be using a static dump, but it’s pretty rare for external, non-OpenStreetMap, companies to have a continuously updated database from OSM.

New users are always welcome, and if they are adding correct things, then I welcome them. It’s always good to have new mappers, adding things for an area they are in. Pokemon Go is a game you play by going outside and walking around, so these people are adding data to their neighbourhood, which can often be better than remote mappers with no idea of the local area.

The map of Batangas City is now filled with a lot of buildings. Before, there were only a few buildings, until I started large-scale mapping of that city (POIs, roads, buildings, land use, power distribution network, etc.) from there or at home, and Project NOAH-ISAIAH started a HOT project to map buildings in Batangas for disaster risk analysis. Thanks to my efforts, and those who participated in the Project NOAH-ISAIAH HOT project.

Dear all,

Today, v3.1.0 of the openstreetmap-carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on openstreetmap.org) has been released.

Changes include

• Added coffee shop rendering
• Added health clinic rendering
• Adjusted place label typography
• Road shield rendering improvements
• Internal code cleanups

Thanks to all the contributors for this release.

For a full list of commits, see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/compare/v3.0.1…v3.1.0

As always, we welcome any bug reports at https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues.

jimbaran